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| Escient FireBall ZP-1 Network Music Player | 
 enlarge | Brand: Escient
Category: CE
List Price: $499.00
Buy New: $437.76
You Save: $61.24 (12%)
New (6) Used (1) from $379.92
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 87889
Color: Black
Media: Electronics
Batteries: 2
Batteries Included: Yes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.1 x 1.6
MPN: ZP-1
Model: ZP-1
UPC: 833366000359
EAN: 0833366000359
ASIN: B000NPX144
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New! Please allow extra 4-5 business days for processing this item.
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| Customer Reviews:
Buggy software, difficult to use music manager on PC March 21, 2008
I have had two of these for about a year now. In that time, I've discovered these issues:
1. The Fireball PC software used to manage your music from a PC or Mac is kludgy, slow, and unreliable. I have never been able to get it to run without crashing on my iMac running Leopard. Escient claims it works on an iMac, but it doesn't, in my experience. (And I am running a brand new iMac purchased in December of 2007). As a result, I have to run the Escient PC software on a Windows PC rather than a Mac.
2. If you are used to music player software like iTunes, Escient's PC software will drive you nuts because it is so slow and crude. It feels like it was designed in 1996 and has never been usability tested or updated since. For example, there is no way to simply play all songs by an artist--which you can easily do in iTunes or Windows Media Player. With Escient's software, to queue up all the songs in your collection by an artist, you must first add all the artist's songs to a playlist, and then play that. For guests at your house who want to simply hear music by one artist, it's a perplexing, counter intuitive process. Also, the PC user interface is often very slow to load and refresh. (I am running it in a house that is wired throughout with gigabit switches and cabling.)
3. Escient playlists will not hold more than 500 songs.
4. When playing songs in a playlist, I found that the playlists often stop playing for no apparent reason.
5. With the PC software used to manage and play music from your computer, there is no way to scroll through albums and songs. Instead, you have to use a page down button, which only moves you through about six albums or songs. Because there is no way to scroll through your music library, it's a huge pain navigating extensive music collections using the PC software. I have contacted Escient about this, and they said they do not have an update to the PC software planned. Oddly, you can scroll through music when using the TV version of Escient's software. It's just that the scroll functionality is missing on the PC.
6. On the upside, Escient is extremely quick to get back to you when you contact them with support questions. I've contacted them about all the problems above. Unfortunately, the responses I have gotten to most of these issues is either that's just the way it is, or it's a bug in the software that Escient has not fixed. That or they involve complicated workarounds that defeat the purpose of installing a user-friendly system for managing and playing your music collection.
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